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Join us at the Melbourne School of Design for our first BE—150 Dean’s Lecture, where Beatriz Colomina explores the impact of medical discourse and imaging technologies on the formation, representation and reception of twentieth-century architecture. She challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that it was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray.Modern architecture and the X-ray were born around the same time and evolved in parallel.While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building unveiled its interior, dramatically inverting the relationship between private and public. Architects presented their buildings as a kind of medical instrument for protecting and enhancing the body and psyche. Colomina traces the psychopathologies of twentieth-century architecture - from the trauma of tuberculosis to more recent disorders such as burn-out syndrome and ADHD - and the huge transformations of privacy and publicity instigated by diagnostic tools from X-Rays to MRIs and beyond.She suggests that if we want to talk about the state of architecture today, we should look to the dominant obsessions with illness and the latest techniques of imaging the body and ask what effects they have on the way we conceive architecture.

Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, technology, sexuality and media. She is Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Media and Modernity Program at Princeton University and Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Architecture. Colomina has lectured extensively at universities and art museums throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Architectural Institute of Japan, and the Guggenheim in New York.

Colomina has been the recipient of diverse awards and fellowships, including the Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the CASVA (Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts), SOM Foundation, Le Corbusier Foundation, Graham Foundation, the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture), The American Academy in Berlin and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. She is on the advisory board of multiple institutions, including The Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, The Istanbul Design Biennial, The Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture in Lyon, ARCH+ in Berlin, The Oslo Center for Critical Architectural Studies (OCCAS), Beyond Media in Florence and The Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. In 2005 she received the Princeton University President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.